This is my “professionalized” bio:
Trần Sắc Phước (Sam Tran):
Aspiring academic yet accidental practitioner in U.S.-Vietnam relations. Former street-level bureaucrat.
Sam Tran is a bilingual (Vietnamese-English) young professional, interested in Southeast Asian diplomacy and public service. He has a diverse background in Asia-Pacific policy across the private, public, and non-profit sectors. Most recently, Sam interned at the International Affairs Division, U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He is an alumnus of the East-West Center – an institution established by the U.S. Congress to promote cooperative study and policy exchange in the Indo-Pacific – and has worked on projects informing U.S. and Asian audiences about their local economic, diplomatic, and educational connections. Sam began his career in international affairs at the US-Asia Institute.
Coming from Vietnam, Sam is aware of the privileges (and responsibilities, and challenges, and quirks) of participating in the American liberalized education and political environments. As a Committee Chair at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst Student Government Association, he elevated his position to be more supportive of 300+ student organizations representing diverse cultures, academic interests, and extracurricular activities. As a Fellow with the Remedying Inequity through Student Engagement (RISE) Program, he spearheaded projects to support over 2,500 minoritized students, including a mentorship program with 25 participants.
A self-described “Tory man with Whig measures” (inspired by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former U.S. Senator (D-NY) whom Sam did research on), Sam attempts to foster better understanding between different American political thoughts. He first got involved into electoral politics as a Vietnamese outreach volunteer at a Orange County, California-based Congressional campaign during the 2022 House election cycle; and was a research assistant with the UMass Amherst Poll.
One of his proudest experiences was a legislative internship with the office of U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, whose Massachusetts’s 2nd district includes Sam’s alma mater town of Amherst. Rep. McGovern is the top Democratic member of the less-noticed, all-powerful House Rules Committee and co-Chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Sam convened an informal, bipartisan group of Vietnamese foreign students who interned in Congress. By October 2025, the nicknamed “Viet Hillterns Caucus” has three members.
A summa cum laude graduate of the Political Science program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Sam learned the bureaucracy of an R1 research institution and the values of a land-grant university. Insofar as an education includes what the institution did NOT teach him, he accidentally learned about the “freedom of expression” nuances amidst global tensions, the skill to (re)define problems, and the public’s tendency to define deviancy down. He graduated early at the cost of no longer being able to eat global-famous campus dining every day.
Sam is happy to discuss anything from Vietnamese political developments <-> the history of the U.S. House of Representatives as an institution. He hopes to research Vietnam’s contemporary policies on citizens studying abroad; most specifically on strategies to recruit, retain, and re-utilize this source of overlooked talents.
P.S. Sam Tran's Site 